10 essential WordPress plug-ins

Add-ons to make your blog more powerful & versatile

Last week I attended a WordPress East Bay meetup in Oakland led by Podcast Asylum trainer Sallie Goetsch (at left in picture above). I’ve been an avid user of, and proponent of, WordPress since I began using the open source platform for all my blogs (Socialmedia.biz, Socialbrite and jdlasica.com) in December 2008.

At the end of the session we began discussing our favorite WP plug-ins. As someone pointed out, the WordPress Plug-in Directory is daunting and not terribly user-friendly, with 8,516 plug-ins and sometimes terse coder descriptions of what they’ve created. So it’s up to bloggers and journalists to sift through the noise and pinpoint the gotta-have plug-ins. (I’ll be doing the same with my favorite Apple iPhone apps next month.)

The WordPress development community is a wonder to behold and one of the main reasons I switched from TypePad to WordPress. Plug-ins greatly expand the number of things you can do with your out-of-the-box WordPress installation.

Here, then, are my 10 must-have WordPress plug-ins for anyone running their own WordPress.org site — I’ll bet you haven’t heard of some of these! Please list some of your own favorite plug-ins in the comments below.

Top 10 WordPress plug-ins

1

Akismet: Taming the spam monster
It’s hard to imagine blogging without Akismet, the free (for personal use) spam filter — both as a stand-alone service and WordPress plug-in — created by WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg and five of his colleagues. About 99 percent of the time, Akismet identifies spam as spam, saving you from having to filter genuine comments and trackbacks from the evil scourge that is spam. Akismet comes already installed on all WordPress sites; you need to activate the API key.

2

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator: Make the search engines happy
My understanding is that the major search engines like it when you deploy and activate a plug-in like Dagon Design Sitemap Generator. In the old days, site maps were for humans. Today they’re chiefly for search engines to help them index your site. The plug-in lets you configure what to show through your WordPress dashboard: pages and posts, how many items to display on each page, etc. I also use Google XML Sitemaps.

3

Broken Link Checker: Identifies bad links anywhere on your site
When I worked for Microsoft in the late ’90s, my favorite tool was our internal system’s dead link checker. I missed this tremendously during first eight years of blogging, since such a tool would serve as an automated editor when I messed up a link or when link rot set in. Now, Broken Link Checker for WordPress does the trick, checking your posts and pages for broken links and missing images and notifying you on the dashboard if any are found. Genius.

4

Creative Commons Plugin Reloaded: Make your posts shareable
Last July I reported that our developer, Esteban Glas, had crafted a Creative Commons plug-in that woud allow users of WordPress blogs to use different CC licenses for each post on the site. Absolutely essential for group blogs like Socialbrite (see the Creative Commons license at the bottom of this post?). You can download it here. For sitewide use of Creative Commons, WpLicense still works.

5

IntenseDebate: Turbo-charge your comments
While WordPress comments are serviceable, I was immediately torn between adding IntenseDebate or Disqus to upgrade the look and functionality of the comments. I settled on IntenseDebate because it’s owned and operated by the WordPress guys and thus will likely see cycles of improvement in the years ahead. You get threaded comments, user images, a comments dashboard, comment voting (though haven’t figured that one out) and Twitter integration. I love the fact that users here can log in via WordPress, OpenID, Twitter or Facebook. (See the Facebook Connect plug-in.)

6

WordPress Database Backup: Back up before tooling around
When adding new plug-ins and monkeying with the code, anything can happen. So install WordPress Database Backup — you’ll be able to return to an earlier state if something goes wrong.

7

All in One SEO Pack: Get discovered
Here’s another unsexy plug-in that does only one thing well — but it’s an important thing. All in One SEO Pack optimizes your WordPress blog for search engines. Just fill in the title and short description at the bottom of your post.

8

Zemanta: Making your blog posts richer
I’ve been using Zemanta for more than a year now and it’s one of my favorite plug-ins. It offers supplemental links, tags and images to your blog post — even before you’re done composing it — by listing on-the-fly with content suggestions relevant to the current text. See at bottom of this post for an example. Zemanta draws from Creative Commons images, Wikipedia, YouTube, Amazon, BBC, CNN and elsewhere. It’s also available as a Firefox plug-in.

9

Audio Player: Bring spoken word and music to your blog Audio Player is a highly configurable, simple mp3 player for all your audio needs. You can customize the player’s color scheme to match your blog theme, have it automatically show track information from the encoded ID3 tags and more. I use it to embed podcasts. Another choice: WPAudio MP3 Player.

10

Smart Update Pinger: Be nice to your RSS subscribers
Did you know that every time you update a WordPress post, it sends out a ping that delivers the update to most RSS readers? That’s pretty awful, especially for minor corrections. Smart Update Pinger solves that problem by pinging only when publishing new posts, not when editing.

Other must-have plug-ins

I’d also put these down as must-haves:

AddThis: This lets folks bookmark your post on virtually any social media site. It helps you see how people share your content (which sites they’re sharing on and which posts are shared the most. Another good choice: ShareThis.

• Tweetmeme ReTweet Button: Adds a “retweet” icon and link to every post and page (Mashable uses this atop every post, Socialbrite uses it at the bottom of every post) . Shortens URLs and can automatically tweet new and scheduled blog posts.

Nice to have, but not essential: wp-Typography, which improves your site’s look.

Newsletter delivery

This isn’t a plug-in, but folks have asked me how to implement an automated email delivery of their new blog posts, simulating an email newsletter. See that field for “Subscribe by email” over there on the right? You can do the same.

Make sure you have a Feedburner account. Select your blog and go to Publicize -> delivery options. You can change the time zone and time of day that emails get delivered but not the frequency — they automatically go out once every day there’s a new blog post. Pretty handy!

WP plug-ins I’m exploring

One caution flag should be raised with so many worthy plug-ins in the marketplace: Don’t activate so many that it compromises your site’s performance. I’m right at the edge now on Socialbrite and Socialmedia.biz, so I’ll be cautious in adding more. Here are some of the plug-ins I’m considering:

• I just installed and activated GD Press Tools, a collection of various administration, SEO, maintenance and security related tools that can help with everyday blog tasks and blog optimization.

• Haven’t installed this yet: WP Content Slideshow shows up to five posts in a nice Javascript slideshow.

• Search Meter: This plug-in tracks what people search for on your site and what results they get.

• RSS Cloud: As soon as you publish, this new plug-in pings services, giving you a 10 to 60-minute jump on other services.

• Ajaxed WordPress: Adds the power of Ajax to WordPress. It can display excerpts of posts and then load full posts inline, submit comments without reloading the page, thread comments to make those long discussions easier to read, etc.

It allows blog owners to raise their WordPress Memory Limits with a couple of mouse clicks, as well as showing at-a-glance memory usage information. WordPress keeps its internal memory limit at 32MB, which is fine for a small-time blog; but if you’re trying to add any robust plugins for social networking or ecommerce applications, 32M will not suffice. This problem can only be expected to worsen with the release of 3.0 which, judging from the beta release, will consume a lot more memory itself without upping the 32MB limit.

I couldn’t have really asked for a much better blog. You’re ever present to present excellent suggestions, going straight away to the point for easy understanding of your subscribers. You’re undoubtedly a terrific pro in this arena. Many thanks for remaining there humans like me.

With so many plugins, and so many plugin lists, it’s hard to know where to start…two here appeal to me, zemanta, and, since I just realised one of my blogs has vanished, the database backup is looking quite an essential to me, as well!

Mike Sandburg

Thanks for the article on your 10 essential plug-ins. I took your advice and installed several of them. I also like the email feed subscribe widget you are using, but cannot seem to find the same plugin. I’ve found several feedburner email subscription plugins, but none that look like yours. Can you please tell me which plugin or widget you are using?